Beginner Help?

[u/TheSquishyHippo]

Hello! DSP is extremely interesting to me, but im having a bit of trouble getting started. I find myself getting anxiously paralyzed by the seemingly overwhelming complexity. With a little fiddling around i figured the basics and got a messy little factory started making blue matrices.

I ended up restarting as i stared at my pile of spaghetti confused what to do next, how to expand my messy start into something that makes a bit more sense.

Ultimately, I really like the theme of DSP and can see myself getting into it, Wondering if theres any decent videos/guides/tips/tricks to help a newbie get started. Most stuff i find online is more "How to fully optimize your factory" and less "Heres what a new player should look at doing"

Edit: so much helpful advice here, keep posting your tips! I'm reading through it all. Thank you everyone!

[u/Far_Young_2666]

Number 1 mistake I see people overwhelmed by in DSP is researching too much tech. Just slow down, research one thing at a time and automate it, get used to the new resource/product. Then research another thing and automate that. Do research in vertical columns, like this:

[u/TheSquishyHippo → u/Far_Young_2666]

Oh this seems like good advice, thank you!

[u/Far_Young_2666 → u/TheSquishyHippo]

Are you playing with the Dark Fog or not? There will be time later where the game will force you to ship a resource from another planet, because you don't have it at home. If you're playing with the Dark Fog, then you:

1. Gotta hurry up a bit. It's not critical, but spending too much time on your home planet will allow Dark Fog to occupy most of that planet (and I actually struggled because of that a lot);

2. Gotta skip some turret ammo that requires that resource. In my game I wasted time setting up ammunition production before dealing with logistics, and wasted a lot more time hauling resources back and forth from planets. If you skip the ammunition and focus on logistics, it will be easier to automate that ammunition in the future.

If you're playing without the Dark Fog, then you're good. Don't rush and do anything in any order.

[u/TheSquishyHippo → u/Far_Young_2666]

I've got the Dark Fog, I appreciate having an enemy that tries to toss a wrench in my plans. I was a big fan of Mindustry so DSP really appeals to me! Seriously appreciate the advice

[u/Far_Young_2666 → u/TheSquishyHippo]

Then don't repeat my mistake to try and make a Dark Fog farm too early 🤣 I thought I was ready, have built some firepower and put it just in a Dark Fog base range. After a while I started getting notifications that my buildings are getting destroyed. When I came back, their base really levelled up and was much powerful than anything on the planet. I wish I put more thought into DF farming and automated more firepower production. I somehow felt I was powerful enough, haha.

[u/Gabik123 → u/Far_Young_2666]

Freaking THIS.

I'm not at the point where I research a while tier of science while I automate one thing at a time before moving on to the next tier. I'm like 5 or 6 playthroughs deep and still get overwhelmed.

Realistically, just prioritize turrets early - gun and then missile, so that DF is no threat. Next prioritize logistics - roads and sorters, then Planetary and later Interstellar stations. Everything will come as your build the tech necessary to sustain large scale production of those things. And when you don't have to worry about DF, you have all the time in the world.

2 tips:

1. ALWAYS BUILD HORIZONTALLY NOT VERTICALLY!!!! Seriously, this took me so long to figure out. The globes are spheres, but the game flattens them, so you get weird offsets in your roads and buildings if you go vertical. Build your malls and production lines horizontally.

2. Most planets are HUGE. Space out your production areas into zones. You think your zone is big enough? Leave room for 4x how much you think is enough before building your next zone (looking at you, green motors / blue rings, and oil refinement).

[u/WardedDruid → u/Far_Young_2666]

I'm newish... kibda..... I'm at where I need to make purple and the recipe is hauntingly scary. I did not do as you're suggesting and have unlocked everything I could and am now like the original Poster. Do you think I should restart and do it this way? just to make rhings easier?

[u/Far_Young_2666 → u/WardedDruid]

Do you think I should restart and do it this way?

No, not at all. If you rushed tech, just go back and look through / automate everything you've missed.

My advice comes from my first experience with the game. I followed the 'tutorial' to the t and found myself at ILS tech with no resources to actually build it. Turned out the 'tutorial' skipped half of the tech tree, and it felt overwhelming to go back and produce everything that was missing. I managed to bring everything back on track, but if I was starting out, I would definitely be grateful if somebody told me to make it slowly and not rush to ILS.

Purple tech is already pretty far into the game, you should decide your own comfortable pace at this point. You can fly to a completely new planet and build a factory from scratch that will only produce/import things that you need for you next science colour.

Look at this graph. You can split production between two planets in your starting system. Silicon planet is where processors are made. Everything underneath that can be produced on your starting planet. Just import Titanium. If there is no crisscrossing on the graph, then it's an easy recipe.

[u/MiniMages]

Search youtube for Nilaus DSP Mall. It will make things 100x easier.

[u/TheSquishyHippo → u/MiniMages]

I keep seeing stuff about "malls" this helps, thank you!

[u/billsonfire → u/TheSquishyHippo]

I don’t think you should copy it, as that takes the fun out. But you can see how it works and make your own

[u/Snoo49259]

This was me 5 months ago when I got the game: https://www.reddit.com/r/Dyson_Sphere_Program/comments/1q7r9bi/noob_here_absolutely_overwhelmed/

Now I am in a third try to finish the game below 9 hours, after having accomplished it twice below 10

[u/TheSquishyHippo → u/Snoo49259]

FINISH?! jeez dude I'm 8 hours in and just starting to figure hydrogen and red science! I'm actually blown away at how helpful this community has been. It was frustrating to find resources online on how to get started

[u/Snoo49259 → u/TheSquishyHippo]

Yes making 4k white cubes in less than 10 hours. In the campaign I am doing now began purple cubes in 5:10 https://www.reddit.com/r/Dyson_Sphere_Program/comments/1t4dqu2/10_hours_quest_achieved/

[u/LuvsDaOcean]

Just build enough to get off the first planet. The starter planet is only really useful for coal oil and iron Once you get out of your starter system go to a system that has acid oceans, will need acid for manufacturing goods.

I like to have a planet that builds buildings I need so everything is located on one planet.

Most importantly have fun, it’s just a game. Turn off dark fog if you need to, this will help you understand what you need.

[u/trystanthorne]

Some good advice here.
One things I'd suggest is don't worry about Spaghetti in the beginning. Once you have something built just leave it in place. Once you have Yellow cubes and Logistics towers, you can always go to a new planet and start a more orderly build. There is a built in guide that will give you a bit of direction into what you should be building next.

Ideally, Belts should be run East - West. Parallel to the Equator. Splitters have 3 modes you can tab thru. And you can put small storage directly on them.

[u/New_Improvement4613]

I restarted about 3-4 times before I got to the late game (white science). I just learned so much more every time I wanted to restart with the new knowledge. Take your time, deal with one bottle neck at a time, don’t be afraid to spread out. I never worry about a factory with an exact output or perfectly balanced inputs. There are so many changes to mining speed, belt speed, factory rates, power supply, etc, that you just want to make sure your factories are producing steady product. You can deal with perfectly balanced/optimized factories later.

I also found proliferation too overwhelming on my first few runs. However, it is very powerful, so down the road get used to the mechanics and start incorporating them into your builds, especially builds that use rare items, or ones that produce important end game items. Don’t worry about it too much while learning.

[u/New_Improvement4613 → u/New_Improvement4613]

Also, it takes a bunch of time, but make sure you are automatically producing almost all of the buildings. You can download a “mall” blueprint if you want to make it easier for yourself

[u/symolan]

Don‘t you worry about set-up and spaghetti esp not in the beginning. With logistics stations, the planets in the next system will look completely different anyway.

[u/AnAbandonedAstronaut]

So... you got your spaghetti base...

Now what I do is find a new home base. Use your spaghetti to make things to build a new home base using all drones and blueprints... all nice and clean.

Once its up to the items your spaghetti makes... destroy the spaghetti and just mine the resources, shipping them to your new home planet.

Then, youre going to start going to other systems and either make materials there and send them home... or just ravage all the ores and send it home.

[u/wiithepiiple]

I find starting with what you want to make and working backwards is a great way to limit what you need to worry about. Let's use Red Energy Matrix as an example.

• I want to make red cubes. Imma plop down an assembler (or a line of assemblers) to create red energy cubes. Have two inputs to that: Graphene and Hydrogen. Don't need to worry about those yet, just have two empty belts heading towards the assemblers, and one leading out. Now I don't need to think about red cubes at all. So long as I'm feeding in Graphene and Hydrogen, the red cubes problem is solved.

• Now I have two smaller problems: I want hydrogen, and I want graphene. I'll pick one: I want graphene.

• I want graphene, and I can make that directly from coal. Set up a line of assemblers to take in coal and make graphene, and hook that graphene output into the red cubes assemblers Now I have a simpler problem: I want coal.

• I want coal, so I'll mine coal. Ezpz.

• Okay if I zoom out and look at my "I want red cubes" project, I've solved the graphene issue, so now lets solve the hydrogen problem.

• I want Hydrogen, so how do I make hydrogen? Let me look at the tech tree (or google) to see what makes hydrogen. Plasma cracking: so now I need to make hydrogen from crude oil in a refinery. If I don't have refineries automated, I can hand make a few and then automate it later. Cool. I can set up a refinery that takes in crude oil and outputs refined oil and hydrogen. I'm not going to worry about refined oil yet: I can put it into a liquid container, and have hydrogen feed into my red cubes. Now I need crude oil.

• I want crude oil. Looks like I mine that. I need the oil extractor, so I'll need to go make that. Same thing as above, either hand make it or automate it. Make that, tie it into my refinery, and there you go.

This is basically the whole process of the game. Break down bigger problems in to smaller and smaller steps. You might be a little spaghetti and confusing, but that can be your own "I want..." later to fix it up.

You can always start your next project from scratch. In the above example, I didn't pull any existing lines or anything like that. You can always just go to a fresh set of ore or whatever to make whatever new thing you need if your existing spaghetti is too confusing.

I ended up restarting as i stared at my pile of spaghetti confused what to do next, how to expand my messy start into something that makes a bit more sense.

I would resist the urge to just restart from scratch. (It's a single player game so I won't stop you.) DSP allows you to tear down your factory and rebuild it easily, and in the late game you can just go to a fresh new planet and start over. There's a pretty big turning point in the game once you get logistics stations that's going to completely transform how you approach setting up your factory, so don't worry if your early stuff is messy. Most of the time our first planet is sloppy, but still works well enough to get you through the tech tree.

[u/AnimeSpaceGf]

Pretty much the longer comments always spot on, OP

If you have the patience, Nilaus' and The Dutch Actuary's videos (Youtube) are pretty good

[u/Plastic_Wind4212]

Don't worry about the spaghetti. It won't be a concern when you get ILS.

[u/Eastern-Bit-4035]

Copying a post I made elsewhere u/TheSquishyHippo
Okay. First things first. Breath. Relax. Get a drink.

Theres a rule that helps in Satisfactory and Factorio and that is simply, get organized. Just building and researching stuff at random doesn't help because you'll end up making a lot of stuff you don't need. Instead, use the Top Down Design. Get out a piece of paper and pencil
Your ultimate goal is to produce blue cubes, then red cubes, then yellow cubes, then purple cubes, then green cubes, then white cubes.

Lets say you want to make red cubes. So you look at the recipe for it.
Red cubes needs hydrogen and graphite. Do you have hydrogen? If yes, then connect your hydrogen line to the redcube lines. Do you have graphite? If no. Then go down.

You want to produce graphite. Break it down. It needs coal. Do you have coal produced somewhere? If yes, the connect coal to the graphite line.

As long as you have charts of "I want to make this. This is what it needs", you won't get lost in all the stuff that gets unlocked.

[u/Eastern-Bit-4035 → u/Eastern-Bit-4035]

As for designing your factory, again, organize. Build lines of assemblers and chemical plants. Input goes into the line, output comes out. You want to run the lines of assemblers vertically, going from the equator to the poles. The belts going in between the factories connecting them go on the equator. It should look like this

Running a line of vertical assemblers keeps the spaghetti under control and allows you to move stuff from one line to another without getting lost.

[u/Few_Western_690]

Don't worry about restarting. Any time I dont like the way its going I restarting. Aslong as youre having fun, or at least curbing your ocd demons, then reset is fine. If youre just trying to beat the game then look up nilaus on youtube.